Janice Chan

August 15, 2023

Collaborating effectively on globally distributed teams

As someone who currently has a majority of her meetings between 5 and 10 a.m. due to time zone differences, and whose partner often starts his evening meetings around my (albeit early) bedtime, I am familiar with the challenges of working across time zones and working with people around the globe.

Long, curving suspension bridge across a body of water, as seen from the pedestrian walkway of that bridge

That being said, years before remote work became a familiar concept (though it existed, it was simply called telework), I’ve worked with people with whom I was not collocated (i.e., we were not working in the same place). I’ve completed projects, sometimes over phone and email only, with people I have yet to meet in person. And let’s be real – many people have had this experience as well. In certain jobs, you’re rarely in the office with your colleagues because you’re constantly on the road. In large companies, you may frequently coordinate with colleagues working in different locations—they’re on site and you’re on site, but you’re not at the same site. My best friend from high school once organized a whole party for me while being out of state and not even actually able to attend! (Thanks, Jess! And Jeremy, for coordinating in-state!)

Here are my top strategies for collaborating effectively (distributed or collocated):

Name your assumptions so you can stop making them. Or at least see if they’re true.
Be intentional and transparent in your communication and planning so as to avoid the confusion of incorrect assumptions (your own and other people’s).

There’s a whole other post that I could write about assumptions and how they trip us up when we are trying to work together. However, for now, I’ll focus on working across time zones and across organizations and across countries. (I’ll admit to not having much experience with working across different global cultures, specifically, since some fields, like scientific research, tend to have a strong culture of their own. And be rather…English language dominant.)

Many of the same things that work well for collaborating effectively across organizational boundaries (companies, departments, disciplines) are also helpful for collaborating effectively across time zones and geographic boundaries. (Well, hopefully someone else is paying attention to any differing regulations, tax requirements, and all that fun stuff.)

In fact, these practices are beneficial for collaborating effectively no matter whom you’re working with and in what context. If there’s a conflict because you expected someone to reply quickly to an email and they didn’t because it wasn’t within their working hours… Then ultimately it doesn’t matter whether you emailed them when it was after hours in their time zone, a holiday in their country (but not yours), a holiday in their religion (but not yours), their day off, or simply because there was no agreed upon response time and they were in the middle of working on a different priority. You can’t be mad at your colleague when you made assumptions (same working hours, same holiday schedule, that your project is more important than the other projects they were working on). Of course, you could just assume that they are ignoring you or not doing their job – but neither of those choices is particularly constructive.

Teams that I’ve been on where there is effective collaboration have the following:

A clear vision for what we are all working towards and a clear definition of success
Role clarity for everyone within the team and also for external parties (e.g., clients, other teams within the organization) who will interact with the team
Explicit (often written) agreements about how we will work together (governance or how decisions get made and who makes them, communications and response times, working and non-working hours, workflows, etc.)
Practices and systems that align with and support those agreements, whether it’s a project management tool, processes for information sharing and knowledge management, or the way you structure team meetings
Recognition of power dynamics* and structures or practices to mitigate these (e.g., not always favoring one time zone over another for meetings, acknowledging that the working language may not be everyone’s first language and that this takes a cognitive toll, awareness of the general tendency for the US teams to have more power when partnering with non-US teams or the headquarters over satellite offices, etc.)

*Depending on the context of your work and whom you’re working with, there are of course all sorts of other power dynamics to consider, but these are examples specific to working across time zones and across different countries.

Perhaps in the future I’ll get the chance to have more experience with working cross-culturally, since I’m not sure yet how that compares to living or traveling among other cultures. But in the meantime, if you’d like to share what has worked well for you in these situations, I’d be interested to learn from your experiences!

July 12, 2023

Drawing out stakeholder requirements with workflow diagrams

Have you ever been asked to find a technology solution for *flailing-arms-make-it-better*?!? Or attempted requirements gathering only to get a detailed explanation of how to do a task in the current system?

As anyone who has done requirements gathering can tell you, it’s a bit of an art form. (Yes, pun intended in the title!)

You want to meet the needs of the people who will use the solution, but it can be challenging to understand the needs of people who may not know how to articulate them in ways that translate well to technical specifications. While business process mapping is not an uncommon part of requirements analysis, it can be hard to get started if you’re new to it and hard to know how to get the necessary information.

This session I presented at the 2023 Nonprofit Technology Conference will break down ways to map workflows and get the information you need to write up effective requirements.

June 1, 2023

Build community to create memorable experiences

Recently, my partner and I went on our first big long vacation since 2019. We went to Italy for two weeks, which was wonderful. Although we did plenty of things on our own, we did sign up for some tours of historic sites, of museums, of a region’s food. Some of the tours were great and some of the tours were…well, they weren’t horrible or anything. They were simply lacking.

What were they lacking?

My partner and I asked each other this, and we both came up with fairly similar answers. The tours and group activities we enjoyed most were the ones where we had the opportunity to build relationships with the other participants – even if only for a couple hours.

Table with a charcuterie board, a dish of olives, a bowl of bread, and a basket of fava beans. No one is sitting at the table yet, — We did a food tour in Florence, and it was not only enjoyable because of the food (sensory touchpoints), or what we learned, or the tour guide, but also because we got to share the experience of trying new food with other people, and we had the chance to share a table and get to know them and hear about their trips as well.

Of course, leave it to a service designer to want to mull on this a little more…

When designing for someone to have a positive experience, you’re often thinking about what the purpose is, what the desired outcome is, what is the person’s job to be done. A big part of this is meeting expectations and understanding what a positive outcome would be for the customer, event attendee, student, whoever is engaging with your product, service, class, tour, whathaveyou. (I get a bit annoyed at the constant talk of delight in the design process. It makes sense if you’re designing something fun, like game or makeup. When I am renewing my driver’s license, what would delight me is to not have to do it at all!)

In service design, a core question is how to create value for everyone involved—the customer and the business to be sure, but also the employees and others involved in or impacted by the service. While it might be focused on the humans using the service and their experience, it’s not sustainable if it burns out your employees nor if it detracts from the organization’s primary goals. (If a person’s goal is to ensure their kids are safe while they go run errands, perhaps that is not great if your organization is say, a museum, and not a childcare provider or otherwise set up to supervise children. And perhaps not great for the kids either.)

Through the framework of service design, we can break a service down into touchpoints (the things a customer is touching, so to speak, whether it’s packaging or an email), interactions between a customer and employee, and all the other layers of what happens (or is needed, infrastructure-wise) behind the scenes that allow us to deliver that service in that way.

Typically, when we think about what will make something a good experience, we think about touchpoints and interactions. Maybe we want our emails to have a friendly tone, or we want to make sure our staff are trained on how to work with disabled customers and provide various accommodations. Maybe we think about the relationships and try to have an assigned account representative for each client or good practices around entering data into a CRM so that any employee can assist any client smoothly with all of their details and history at their fingertips.

But how often, unless our service is explicitly about creating community, do we think about creating community within group experiences? How often do we consider the interactions between our clients, students, participants?

I’ve been a community manager—where my role was specifically to foster community and knowledge exchange among an evolving group of practitioners. (I still do this for fun in my creative pursuits!) But I’ve also used community building in other roles and in shorter terms.

When I was a technical instructor who was training new staff, I always started each training with an icebreaker. I would ask at least one question that was about us as people outside of work, and I usually tried to ask one question that related to the topic. I did this for a few reasons:

Whatever people were doing before they came to the training, meeting, workshop, or other session you’re facilitating, it’s helpful to give people a way to shift their brains into what you’re about to do next.
Most of the training I led was required onboarding, and it was all on using databases, which is a bit of a dry topic to dive directly into for many people. When it’s a topic that sometimes people dread, or that they’re a little worried will be difficult, it’s helpful to ground people in their existing knowledge. For example, during trainings on using the database to manage event attendees, I would ask people to share about an event they enjoyed and what made it a positive experience.
Everyone in my trainings had recently joined the organization. I wanted to provide a low-stakes opportunity for them to practice introducing themselves with their new role and to get to know other new employees across the organization (a rare opportunity in most large organizations, as this was).
I wanted to model what kind of space this was: a space where they could be seen as more than their job title, where they were invited to participate and use their voice from the start, and a space that, in its playfulness, hopefully felt more like a sandbox and less like a classroom.

Certainly, everyone was there to check the box as something they needed to perform their jobs. But I’d like to believe my efforts also helped reduce any anxiety (a thing in data/technology training) so that they could learn, helped new employees feel a little more seen and connected within such a vast organization, and made it easier for people to reach out to me for help in the future (many did). And that’s valuable to the training participants, it’s valuable to the organization, and it was valuable to me, as an instructional designer – to know what other learning needs there were after the training.

At the time, I didn’t think of it as building community. I thought of it as holding and shaping a space, for that time when we were all together, and creating an atmosphere within that space where we would all be primed for what we were about to do together—so that we may get the most value out of it.

The ability to connect as humans with everyone experiencing the same thing I am in the moment always make things a little brighter, and a little deeper. Growing up in NYC, sometimes we would have blackouts in the summer. And the neighbors emerge from their homes, and we’d sit outside together and talk, creating our own light in the dark.

Build community, even if it’s ephemeral.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s for an hour-long workshop, or a three-hour tour, or if the people will ever see each other again. Sure, having one instructor train 20 new employees is more efficient than training everyone 1:1. But it’s not the only reason to do it.

I’d like to call out that, first of all, it’s far less awkward. Isn’t a little silly to act as if everyone is in their own little bubble and can’t see or hear the other participants? Rather than leaving people to navigate the ambiguous social situation by themselves, we could (as facilitators, hosts, tour guides, et al.) create a starting point for intentional connection.

More importantly, creating opportunities for human creation is another way to add value to the experience. It is human to crave connection. If you’ve ever experienced something and suddenly wished that a specific person was there to share it with you – you know that an experience is different when you’ve shared it with someone. The same way that adding a dash of salt deepens the taste of caramel or that sprinkling in some red pepper flakes near the end of cooking intensifies the other flavors in a dish, that connection makes an experience feel fuller, as if you yourself, in opening up to others, have more fully opened up to that experience.

While you may not build a community that outlasts the event, human connections are the foundation. So why is this post about community rather than about connections? Simply trying to connect people to each other ends up being some sort of transactional speed-dating situation that leaves everyone unsatisfied. But if you think about it in terms of building community, and leave it open to each member to contribute what they will, you create something much better together.

March 27, 2023

A few things I’ve learned about creating accessible slides

Apologies if you came here expecting that I was a playground designer, although there are people who make accessible play areas!

View seated for a conference talk in a room set up with tables and chairs and printed materials on the tables. At the front of the room is a glowing projector screen with a blank screen. No one else appears to be in the room. — *Are you typically creating slides that you’ll present online? In person? (This photo was taken before someone else’s presentation at a conference several years ago.)*

There is no perfect way to make things 100% accessible to everyone because people are different. I state that upfront as a reminder to myself as much as to anyone else that this work is not perfect, that it is messy, and that none of this should stop us from working to make things more accessible to more people right now.* I do not and I am not going to get everything right. I’m sure I’ve failed on a lot of these points in previous slide decks and I will continue to make mistakes. None of these tips are foolproof, and this list is not exhaustive. Perhaps you’ll read it and say you knew all these things already—and that you have some things to teach me! (Which would be great! Please do.) But, hey, maybe some of this will be new to some people. So, I will continue on with my imperfect notes on how I’ve been trying to make my slides more accessible.

Some of these things I learned from the speaker guide for NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, some from a class in graduate school on making information accessible (taught by the awesome Dr. Renee Hill!), some from independent learning about accessibility, and some things by trial and error.

The context of this post is creating slides that I’m preparing to present, such as for a conference talk, as opposed to other purposes. Although I may sometimes mention things related to presenting, the focus will be on the slides themselves. I most often use PowerPoint, so I mention some specific things in the version of the program I have, so if you have a more recent version or use something else for creating slides, those functions might be called something else or work a little differently.

Here are some things I’ve been learning and working at incorporating in my slides:

Always check the template (and any other colored elements you are choosing) to ensure you have sufficient color contrast. Unfortunately, those default templates are not necessarily accessible – even when they are labeled as such. You’ll want to check things like the color contrast for people who are colorblind or have low vision. If you like to create your own templates, start with a color palette that has sufficient contrast. Of note, color contrast is not only about the colors, but sometimes about the size and font weight. Black text on a white background will work at any legible size, but certain color combinations that are readable at font size 40 will not be readable by everyone at a font size 20. While it’s not perfect, if your combination doesn’t work if printed in grayscale, you should probably adjust the color palette.
Make sure every slide has a title. Occasionally, I will not use the template title area, or because I am not using a template, it is unclear which text is the title of the slide. While it might be obvious to a sighted person, it’s important to make sure someone using a screen reader would be able to use titles to help navigate through the slides. In PowerPoint, if you turn on “Check accessibility,” an Accessibility tab will be added to the ribbon at the top. You use the button for setting the slide title to set a specific text box to be the slide title.
Include an agenda and let people know what point in the presentation they’re at. This is more of a presentation tip, but it’s helpful to orient people to what’s going to be covered and to give people a sense of where they are in the agenda. This can be especially helpful for people with cognitive or learning disabilities, but it’s helpful to everyone. I usually include a slide with a numbered list of the topics or sections, and then each section starts with a section header slide that references the section number and where we are in the presentation. (If it’s hard for me to break it out this way, then it probably means the presentation needs some further organization.)

Slide that shows the section header: "1 / 5 What is service design?" followed by some footer information with the name of the presentation and the presenter — In this example of a section header slide, the title of the section, “What is service design?” follows “1 / 5” to indicate that this is the first of five sections in the presentation.

Use a font size of at least 18, but preferably larger! Using a larger font size also prevents you from putting too much text per slide, as slide are intended to be presented. If you truly need to write that much, you are writing a report! Or at least an article or blog post. They’re fine formats, but they are formats that meant to be read at your own pace instead of at the speed at which someone is giving a presentation.
IF YOU WRITE IN ALL CAPITALIZED LETTERS FOR VERY LONG PORTIONS OF TEXT, THIS IS VERY DIFFICULT FOR EVERYONE TO READ. That took you an extra moment to read and comprehend, didn’t it?
Leave the bottom 20% of the slide blank so that captions won’t cover up any content. Occasionally you might be presenting within a platform where the captions are not on top of the slides, but if you’re not sure, the bottom is often where captions are placed on a screen. (Unsure if there will be captions? Ask! It doesn’t matter whether you personally need them. Other speakers and attendees might, and they shouldn’t have to ask.)
Include alternative text for images, videos, diagrams, and other visual elements that are relevant. Avoid text in images; simply use the text. (This is inaccessible both to people using screen readers and to people using translation software or other text-based tools.) For videos, you’ll need to consider both captions and video descriptions (a description of what is happening visually) so that the content is accessible to audience members who are blind or D/deaf. You can mark decorative images as decorative and skip the alt text, although it’s worth asking the question of what those images are adding to your presentation.
Plan to describe the images verbally if they’re relevant. Okay this isn’t about the slides, but during the presentation, make sure you verbally describe the visual elements that you created alternative text for. Or if you are demonstrating something live, then describe what you’re doing – like if you were on a cooking show.
- Speaker descriptions: Some people say the speakers should describe themselves, and others say this isn’t really useful information. Within the blind community, there are a lot of differing opinions on speaker descriptions. Unless I’m asked to describe myself visually, I tend to use the guideline of whether it is relevant. If the topic is related to career development, then the fact that I am an Asian American woman in my mid-30s is relevant. If I am talking about working remotely, then it makes sense to reference my surroundings. If I am showing people how to create diagrams, then a description of my visual appearance and what sighted people can see in my background feels performative rather than adding anything to an understanding of the topic.
Review the order of object order on your slides. If someone is using a device like a screen reader, you’ll want them to go through everything on your slides in the correct order. An easy way to test this is to use the Tab key to tab through each object (title, text box, image, etc.) on each slide. You can usually right click to move an object forward or backward. (Reading order starts in the back and moves forward to end in the front.)

My process for creating slides

Sometimes it’s difficult to take a collection of tips and figure out how to apply them in practice. My process for creating slides and presentations may be different from yours, but here’s a rough summary of my current process:

Draft learning objectives, usually as a document.
Use the learning objectives to draft an outline, usually in the same document.
Start a new slide file and pick a template.
Check that the template color contrast is sufficient. (Turn on accessibility checker to help me with this if it’s available.)
Edit the template if needed.
Start building out the content in the slides – usually putting the bullet points from the outline as the temporary slide titles.
Work on developing the text and the speaking points in whatever order I can get it to come out in. Usually I put in placeholders for visuals that I need, but also sometimes information that I need to go find. I typically turn off or ignore the accessibility checker during this part.
Lots of iterating, editing, filling in those placeholders, refining speaking points.
Once the visual elements are finalized, I write alternative text. (I usually turn the accessibility back on at this point because it helps me tick off images that need alt text.)
If I forgot to describe something in the speaking points, then I incorporate the description of visuals.
Review and address any other accessibility issues that come up – with the exception of slide order, which I leave until last in case I need to make other changes.
Go through the presentation as a whole, both the slides and practicing the speaking, to make sure everything works together as a whole (and within the allotted time).
Check the slide order by tabbing through each object on each slide and adjusting the object order as needed.
If there’s a method for making the slides available to attendees ahead of the presentation (so they can review as needed, at their own pace, using the appropriate tools, ahead of time), then I do that.

What else? I’m open to learning how to do things better! Email me and let me know if you learned anything new from this post, have suggestions, or what your process looks like for creating slides.

*While there’s no such thing as perfect accessibility, there is indeed possibility to do things that make the situation worse. For example, using an accessibility overlay on your website often makes a website less accessible than say, if you had forgotten to put alt text for images. (Okay, that’s not great, but at least it doesn’t break the other parts of your website.) Better to keep things simple, and to keep working at making your website more accessible.

March 10, 2023

Managing change when making big changes

Author’s Note: Is this change something new that you are in the process of planning? You may want to read “How to plan to do something you’ve never done before” before this one if you haven’t already.

Someone holds a phone with a compass app open while standing near a compass embedded in the sidewalk. Per the sidewalk compass, the person should be facing north, but the smartphone compass app says that this direction is 32 degrees north east. — In case you can’t tell from the photo, the compass on the sidewalk says we are facing north, but my friend’s smartphone compass app says that we’re actually pointing towards 32 degrees north east!

If you’ve ever managed a project with a long timeframe or been responsible for implementing a major change, then you know that, well, things change. Inevitably, you’ll discover something that hadn’t been accounted for or that wasn’t as clear at the beginning, or perhaps, something in your context will have changed. Maybe there’s a new opportunity you’ll want to be able to seize.

You may have even identified some potential risks and come up with plans to mitigate them. It is, however, impossible to know everything that could possibly happen or change or that needs to be accounted for when you’re initially planning a project. One of the best ways to plan for the unexpected is to plan for change, to build in a margin for it. That’s why it’s helpful to save for an emergency fund, and why you build extra time and contingency into a project budget.

You can also plan to make changes, even if you don’t know what the changes will be. Worse comes to worse, your plan works out.

Many people plan regular times to check in and evaluate progress on a project, especially a change management project, but even better is to regularly ask the question of what changes need to be made and evaluate the plan itself.

Plan to change your plan

Here’s how to prepare for course adjustments before you start really diving in:

Schedule check-in meetings and put them on the calendar along with an agenda. How many and how often depends on the scope of what you’re doing and the timeframe. Perhaps you might split it into thirds or around key milestones or phases. If this is more of a continuous thing than a discrete project, then figure out a timeframe when enough will have happened to answer some key questions, but not so much time that it will be hard to change course.
Determine how it will be decided whether to adjust course and how. This could be by consensus, by the project lead having final say, or some type of measure (e.g., as long as our revenue is on track within 5%, we stick to the plan)—or some combination.
When planning out the work, plan the first third in the most detail, the second third with some detail, and leave the last third at a high-level. This will make it easier to make changes since you’ll have left some planning (e.g., who is doing what specific tasks during which week or month) until after the check-in point.

If this is a change management project (e.g., implementing a new system and new processes), having scheduled check-ins to review and adjust the plan can also support your cause. One thing people worry about during a big change is that it will be terrible, it will make things worse, and they will be stuck with it. (That can happen, of course!) However, transparency about how changes will be made and opportunities to provide feedback or request adjustments (e.g., including some time to work out the new time tracking process before the summer staff join) can alleviate some concerns. You can engage them as beta testers and partners in working out any issues before the full rollout.

Considerations for course adjustments

Here’s are some things you might want to discuss at the start of the project and then during check-ins:

What is the desired outcome at the end of this scope of work/part of the project?
What assumptions was this planned work based upon? Have things changed? You will likely need to change your plan if an assumption no longer holds. If it was a constraint, then maybe you don’t need to change anything but this opens up other opportunities. Note:Assuming that the plan will lead towards the desired outcome is an assumption.
Does it look like we’re making progress towards the desired outcome? This is really about whether it is working for the team/organization or not.
What changes do we need to make to our plan? This can be adding things, subtracting things, or modifying how you go about them (e.g., method, strategy, timing, who does what).
Do we need to change how we evaluate the need for course adjustments at our next check-in?

When the only constant is change, might as well plan for it!

February 28, 2023

How to plan to do something you’ve never done before

There are things that someone can show us how to do, like how to tie our shoelaces or how to fry an egg. Then there are the things you can really only learn by doing: riding a bicycle, managing people. However, it’s always helpful to have some frameworks for how to approach the new thing as you’re learning while you’re doing it.

Every time I have to do something new that is big enough in scale to warrant a plan (or feels overwhelming enough that I want to make a plan), I start with what I call the “What’s Needed Exercise.”

Notebook page titled, "What's needed?" with a bulleted list that reads: Tasks; Decisions; Information; People; Supplies, equipment, venues, etc.; Time, budget, commitments

This exercise is very simple: I ask myself what is needed to make this thing happen and don’t stop writing (or typing) until I run out of ideas of things that might be needed. Then I organize them.

Regardless of what the new thing is – a volunteer training, version 2 of a custom grants management system, moving to a new country – there are typically a few categories of things that are needed.

Here are some prompts for thinking through what’s needed:

What are the steps or tasks to do the big new thing?
What decisions need to be made? By whom?
What information* is needed? How do we get this information (ask someone, conduct design research, analyze the website data)?
Which people are needed and for what? (This could be people on a MOCHA or DARCI chart, or this could be people to do X thing, or it could be that you need an expert in alligator wrestling.)
What supplies, tools, equipment, systems, or venues are needed?
What time or budget or commitments are needed?

*If you can’t articulate what success looks like and how you’ll be able to tell that you’ve made it to your destination, then you’ll want to add to the list of information that is needed (or decisions to be made).

I don’t try to answer those questions in order, though you can if it’s helpful. Typically, I’ll make my massive list (in a document or a spreadsheet or as sticky notes on a board) and then organize them.

Here are some groups I find useful:

To do
To decide
To find out
To get

Once they’re organized a little bit, it will be easier to see the dependencies. Then you can begin to sequence them.

And there’s your game plan! Well, okay, you probably have a specific timeframe for getting this thing done, or you might be working on this with other people, and so you’ll need to work on the timeline and how you and the others will work together. But this can get you started on estimating the level of effort, how much time you’ll need to allocate, and when it can fit on the calendar, how many people (and which ones) you need to get to help you, and so on. Here’s a way you can start when you’re not sure where to start!

What approaches or tactics have worked well for you when planning to do something new? I’d be interested to hear what works well for you or how it goes if you try this out. Of course, it’s common, when you do something for the first time, that things don’t always go according to plan and you find yourself having to make some course adjustments along the way. Stay tuned for a post on how to plan to change the plan…

February 9, 2023

On the magic of medium, or why we write on sticky notes with markers

Have you ever been in a workshop or meeting where you’re handed a pile of sticky notes and a marker?

white wall with multiple colors of sticky notes arranged in columns and sequenced in a workflow from left to right

Did you ever wonder why you couldn’t simply use a pen? Or why can’t you write your ideas directly on the whiteboard?

It is true, that it will be easier to see things written in marker than in pen, especially if you’re looking at them from a standing-in-front-of-a-wall distance rather than a reading-a-piece-of-paper-on-your-desk distance. It is also true that the sticky notes allow you to move the ideas around more easily and arrange them in different configurations.

What else?

Sticky notes are usually small squares or rectangles. They automatically set some limits on how much you can write on there – especially if you’re writing in marker. It encourages you to break your thoughts and ideas into smaller units that can then be easily arranged and sorted and combined in various ways.

Writing in a small space with marker forces you to be more succinct. You’re more likely to put down a bullet point or a phrase or a word rather than a complete, composed sentence. Even on a letter sized sheet of paper, when you write with marker, it is more likely that you’ll write something like headlines or bullet points than an essay. You can write headlines or bullet points on a sheet of paper using a pen, true. However, the narrower point and more precise line that results also tends to encourage that we work to perfect what we write with a pen. Consider even the difference between how you write when using pen and paper vs. typing.

Combined, sticky notes and markers encourage a rapid fire of ideas, balancing the constraint of space with the fuzziness of using a less precise medium. While digital whiteboards and sticky notes where you can change the font size can be very convenient, the benefits of a particular form can get lost.

Next time you’re having trouble getting started on a new project or getting stuck trying to solve a problem, try using a different medium to work on it.

Inspired by this issue of the Ask Polly newsletter, in which Heather Havrilesky interviews Austin Kleon, who mentions using a pocket brush pen.

October 20, 2022October 20, 2022

The power of actually sharing photos

Even if you haven’t done marketing and communications work, I bet that you’ve felt that magnetic pull of an image – especially on those sites and apps with infinite scroll and where the supply of cute animal photos (and now videos) feels endless. We’ve all felt the power of an image that compelled us to click to see more, understood stories that told only in photos, and most of us have probably also fretted about what photo to use when sharing certain things on social media. (Don’t worry, I fretted plenty over what photo to use for a post about the power of sharing photos!)

The St. Mary's River at the tail end of sunset, the sky pastel pink and yellow and purple and reflected in the calm water — The St. Mary’s River at the tail end of sunset, the sky pastel pink and yellow and purple and reflected in the calm water — I spent many many evenings and nights walking by the St. Mary’s River during college (at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a.k.a. the best St. Mary’s!) because I love, love, loved watching the sunset in the water, the jewel tones at dusk, and the lights that shined across the river at night, and the sound of the water gently lapping. Even just seeing it now brings back lots of fond memories of long walks with friends and the types of conversations it seems that you can only really have late at night.

As a writer, it may not be surprising that when it comes to social media, I mostly use words. However, I’ve really come to love sharing photos one on one. With my parents, we often share pictures of what we’re eating and meals we’ve cooked. My friends share photos of their pets and kids and gardens and bathroom renovations. I’ll send a friend a picture of something I saw in a store that I know they would have liked or gotten a kick out of. I’ll send the pet lovers photos of the cat. One of the sweetest birthday presents I ever received was a video of my niece and nephew singing happy birthday to me, while I was half a world away.

Why does it feel so different than if I had seen the photo on social media, instead of in a message sent directly to me? Isn’t social media still a way of sharing what’s going on in our lives or what we’re experiencing with friends and family?

Several years ago, I took a course on knowledge management where they had a number of really wonderful guest lecturers (I learned so much! Thanks, Tara and Piers!). And one day, there were two people from an NGO I have unfortunately forgotten the name of, but they basically did work around storytelling and public health and helping organizations get better at storytelling to get their messages across. And they had us all do an activity: We were paired up and then told to find a photo on our phone and share it with our partner and tell them about it.

The magic that lit up that room. Everyone was abuzz and they had to really get our attention to wrap up the activity. Although the speakers were showing us the power of photos in terms of storytelling, here’s what I remember.

I remember how a group of us who had just met a couple days ago were now telling a near stranger about our favorite places, about how proud we were of our kids, about life changing trips, about loved ones who maybe were no longer with us. In the span of a few minutes.

I remember that the room felt warmer. That I felt looser and more grounded at the same time. That while we had all been sharing, the space felt alive.

Because we were building relationships with each other – with the person sitting next to us. Even if one person was showing the photo and telling the story at a time, it was still a two-way street. The other person made eye contact, nodded, smiled, made verbal acknowledgements, and/or asked questions.

And that’s the thing that gets missed sometimes in social media. Don’t get me wrong – there can certainly be a power to sharing our stories and letting people in when we say, post a photo or even a written story on a social media site. Obviously, I would not write blog posts if I did not believe there was also value in sharing things with a wide audience. There’s a place for that and it is needed.

But sharing a photo with one person (or even one small group of people) directly is a way to connect, to build relationships, to let people in—to say, “I choose you to share this with.”

There’s a conversation you can have in that space that you have created with the other person that you can’t have with an audience because you can each be equal participants. The other person can contribute to the conversation and move it to another place – beyond simply responding to what you had posted or shared (though they can do that, too). It’s easy for social media posts to get performative without necessarily intending for them to. But in a conversation with another person, it’s not about metrics.

When I worked in offices, I tried to make a point of acknowledging people when I or they walked in. Maybe it was a hello or head nod or a slight rap on the top of their cubicle wall as I went by. Because all of us, we need to feel seen, too. Feeling seen is different from being seen.

And that’s why conversations will never be replaced by posting and publishing.

So I say…in this blog post…which I am publishing. But if you want to talk, or have a photo to share, you can always drop me a line so we can have a conversation.

October 6, 2022October 6, 2022

Make use of your calendar defaults

Cropped screenshot of settings in Google Calendar with "Add calendar" highlighted, and under that category, "Browse calendars of interest" highlighted — The holiday calendars are often found in calendar settings under “Add calendar”

A couple weeks ago, I was trying to schedule some meetings and looking to avoid suggesting dates that fell on Jewish holidays (since I was meeting with people who would be observing). And for as long as I can remember, I have always done an internet search for “Jewish holidays [this year]” and simply referenced one of the lists that popped up. Same for other countries or other religions. Easy enough.

Then someone vented to me about their colleagues scheduling a meeting on a holiday, and it being a constant pattern, and how they could have simply turned on the “show me X holidays” in the platform that their company used for calendars. You wouldn’t even have to look up anything! These days would simply show up when you opened your calendar. And I was reminded (d’oh!) that there are calendar settings, and I don’t have to manually look up holidays each time I try to schedule something with someone who might observe different holidays than I do. Most calendars will have such options.

Screenshot within Google calendar settings that shows "Regional holidays" with both Japan and US holidays checked off, and then "Global religious holidays" with all boxes checked (Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox) — There may be other holidays that are relevant for you and those you work with — this is simply an example!

So here’s your friendly reminder to make use of those calendar settings if you haven’t already!

P.S. Bonus points if, as the organizational administrator, you go and adjust the defaults to help everyone at your organization be more inclusive in scheduling meetings!

September 26, 2022

Finding handholds when you don’t understand the conversation

Here's my fancy new rice cooker and instruction book -- with all the buttons and instructions in Japanese. Not sure if my bungling this would be an issue of poor machine translation or more about the number of functions! (My old rice maker only had a cook/warm toggle. I unplugged it to turn it off.) — Here’s my fancy new rice cooker and instruction book — with all the buttons and instructions in Japanese. Not sure if my bungling this would be an issue of poor machine translation or more about the number of functions! (My old rice maker only had a cook/warm toggle. I unplugged it to turn it off.)

People are saying things. They seem to be words. They seem to be in some type of sentence structure. But what are they saying? Or perhaps you are trying to read something that is written in some language that somebody would understand—and that person is not you.

And it’s too much. It’s too much. It begins to wash over you, like the background chatter of other people’s conversations at a café. Then all of a sudden, you jolt and remember you were supposed to be paying attention because now you are supposed to do something or answer a question and that would be…what, exactly?

Having moved to a country where I am still learning the language (and likely will be for a long time), this is constant. So when a client mentioned that they were working with some consultants* on something they knew nothing about, and that they found it difficult to follow the conversations and be proactive—it made me think of all the parallels to learning a foreign language.

One of the most challenging things in an unfamiliar language is that you can’t filter. You hear a combination of sounds and you cannot tell where one word ends and the next begins, let alone which is a noun or a verb or the name of a place. (This is probably why many people don’t bother reading the standard privacy policy written in legalese.)

My strategy for tackling this inability is to find as many handholds as possible, and to use one to get to the next—the way a climber uses this handhold or that foothold to launch themselves to the next one and eventually climb up the mountain.

What does this mean in understanding a language? That you go from hearing something like the wah-wah-wah of grownups talking on Peanuts (really a trombone with a mute) to hearing something that you know is a question to hearing, “Would you like something-something?” And for a topic that’s not your area of expertise, maybe you go from hearing “acronym jargon jargon jargon” to “Some government agency announced that they are making changes to policy-that-applies-to-organizations-that-work-with-children.” Then you can hear that and know whether or not you need to pay attention (filtering!) based on whether or not your organization works with children.

Here are some tactics for finding handholds (or footholds) when you don’t understand the conversation:

Start by identifying words—as in, you can tell when one word ends and the next begins. (This is probably more for learning an actual foreign language rather than a different work language, but in the latter case, you likely already have this down.)
Use props, diagrams, or gestures as much as possible. As someone who had to order custom sized curtains for her very tall windows using elementary level Japanese—and had them come out the way I intended—I attribute my success to being able to point towards different samples in the store, gesturing, and the diagrams on the order form for getting the measurements into the correct fields. However, diagrams are also helpful for getting everyone on the same page when you’re dealing with something abstract (data definitions) or working with people across different disciplines.
Learn and leverage patterns. For example, I knew that generally after you get seated at a restaurant, a server will come and ask if you are ready to order. So I can point at the menu even if I don’t actually understand the words in the question. Familiarity with patterns is helpful not only in routine interactions but also in navigating websites—like which button is “cancel” vs. “submit”! A work example of this might be that you are working on a project to implement a donor database instead of using spreadsheets. The pattern, when you implement something new, is that this is a change from how people are used to working, and changes require some management in order to stick. So even if you know nothing about databases, you can ask about the change management plan.
Become familiar with the words that answer who/what/where/when/how. This might sound silly if you’re say, a fundraiser trying to understand how to accept a cryptocurrency donation, since maybe you and the person explaining it to you both speak English. However, it’s still helpful to be able to tell which wah-wah-wah is the name of a form of cryptocurrency and which wah-wah-wah is a service or an institution that you need to coordinate the process with.
Leverage what you know as a jumping off point and grab onto the next handhold. When you’re learning a foreign language, it’s really helpful to have a good understanding of the mechanics of your own language. Let’s say you don’t understand algorithms and your teenage nephew sighs with exasperation every time you ask about a new social media platform. However, the key communications principle of needing to understand your audience doesn’t change, even if who they are and what appeals to them and what’s the best way to reach them keeps evolving.
This can also mean you need to let go of something you do know. A climber has to let go of the holds they’re using to make their way to the next one and keep climbing up. Maybe getting a foothold in being more inclusive means letting go of only considering “they” to be a plural pronoun not to be used to refer to a single person.
Then build connections back to what you know. Turn that leap (from one foothold to the next) into a bridge that you can traverse back and forth and build upon in the future. For example, maybe you learn that the social media algorithm will show people more videos that are similar to ones they liked or spent time interacting with. Now you can separate the mechanics of which videos get promoted from the principle that people want to watch things that are interesting to them. This allows you to ask separate questions about how that similarity is determined (by tags or metadata vs. users like you) and questions about what is most interesting to your audience.

While I am fairly comfortable working and communicating across different work languages (and disciplines), I am curious to hear what has worked well for you! Please share any other tips.

*As a consultant, my stance is that you’ve hired me the consultant to help you. That includes making sure you actually understand enough to be able to make informed decisions (and implement the solution, if that’s the plan). Otherwise, my job is not done yet! So if you’re not understanding what a consultant is telling you, it’s fair to ask them to re-explain in order for you to understand.